Monday, December 17, 2007

As a service to our readers, I just want to be proactive and list a few articles that do not belong here on LG15 Today (even though some may find them entertaining), just in case anyone is thinking about posting them here.

Dad sells son's 90-dollar video game online for more than 9000 "After catching his 15-year-old smoking pot, a father sold the hard-to-get 'Guitar Hero III' video game he bought his son for Christmas at an online auction, fetching 9,000 dollars." ... "I came home from work early and what do I find? My innocent little boy smoking pot in the back yard with two of his delinquent friends. ... I am still considering getting him a game for his Nintendo. Maybe something like Barbie as the Island Princess or Dancing with the Stars ... I know he will just love them."

Okay, I was just looking for funny things to post here, but I ran across this article (in video form) that might belong on LG15 Today since it discusses convergence of media:

Video: Video Games Meet TV in 'Leaving The Game' "What would a TV show made just for you look like? ... Kuma Games and the AFI (American Film Institute) Digital Content Lab have developed a storytelling device that merges personalization with computer-generated filmmaking."

I'm personally dubious that this is going to result in anything very good anytime soon, but I have seen some kids' shows that use video-game style graphics, and of course the big budget animation studios like Pixar have been very successful, so who knows? There may be a viable niche for this kind of computer generated content.

In his recent radio show on Bree.FM last Wednesday, What Time Is It : Live Coverage of Glenn, Glenn Rubenstein mentioned that he had dabbled in animation over the summer, looking at it as a way to tell a story he had in mind. Glenn used some of what he learned to create 3D animated titles using Adobe After Effects in his recent video, Aly Zarin!

I had similar thoughts myself earlier this year, experimenting with creating an animated version of Aunt Alex, but found the process very time consuming (and difficult to sync to real voice without buying additional tools) so set it aside. Here is a very short piece I created as a quick experiment with a free version of DAZ Studio, just to see how the images rendered and looked when placed on YouTube and Revver at a certain frame rate:

What do you think? Can individuals or small-budget independent producers use currently available digital tools to produce decent animated content for the online audience?